I was bullied as a boy – lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.

I never read one hateful thing said about me by some 12 year old. So I got to live an actual life. And I’ve kept that mentality. Just because there’s a hurricane going on around you doesn’t mean you have to open the window and look at it.

There will be days when I walk in an arena and people will cheer and then there might be days when I walk in an arena and people might boo, but it all sounds the same to me because it’s all just noise that lets me know that I’m relevant.

Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.

The person you consider ignorant and insignificant is the one who came from God, that he might learn bliss from grief and knowledge from gloom.

Your life is like a play with several acts. Some of the characters who enter have short roles to play, others, much larger. Some are villains and others are good guys. But all of them are necessary; otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the play. Embrace them all, and move on to the next act.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

If your inner life is not producing what you would like on the outside, don’t be discouraged… just be willing to change.

Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn’t do to upset one’s own vanity.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.

Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.

I’m kind of fascist with myself, you know.

I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn’t identify with the person on the screen. I couldn’t get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

I am who I am. That’s why my friends and peers respect and appreciate me. I don’t change or cater my actions to fit my surroundings. I’m myself 24/7. People appreciate that.

Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I’m sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.

You know, most people really don’t know me.

There is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse.

I’m just a kid – I’ve got a lot of stuff to do yet.

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.

If I make a fool of myself, who cares? I’m not frightened by anyone’s perception of me.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of connection and the path to the feeling of worthiness. If it doesn’t feel vulnerable, the sharing is probably not constructive.

Do not look for approval except for the consciousness of doing your best.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

We cannot learn men from books.

Part of me suspects that I’m a loser, and the other part of me thinks I’m God Almighty.

You must live for another if you wish to live for yourself.

I have surrounded myself with very smart people.

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

Get mad, then get over it.

I didn’t play with other children.

The giving of love is an education in itself.

Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour, content to dwell in decencies for ever.

What we face may look insurmountable. But I learned something from all those years of training and competing. I learned something from all those sets and reps when I didn’t think I could lift another ounce of weight. What I learned is that we are always stronger than we know.

I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not. I’m really confused now.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.

I don’t really know that much about love, it turns out.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

One of the things I definitely think of as a driver of me is fear. And it’s fear of failure, fear of being overtaken.

I’m not trying to follow a set of rules and stuff. I’m just living my life.

If you choose to do something, attack it. You can hate me, but there’s one thing you can’t say about me – that I didn’t attack it.

Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege.

You get one life. I’m going to embrace mine.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There’s nothing to do but to stand there and take it.

What I admire most about Hillary is that she never buckles under pressure. She never takes the easy way out. And Hillary Clinton has never quit on anything in her life. And when I think about the kind of president that I want for my girls and all our children, that’s what I want.

The older you get, the better you get.

Fresh activity is the only means of overcoming adversity.

One of my proudest moments is I didn’t sell my soul for the sake of popularity.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

To live is to find out for yourself what is true, and you can do this only when there is freedom, when there is continuous revolution inwardly, within yourself.

When I wake up in the morning, I feel just like any other insecure 24-year-old girl.

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.

There are no second acts in American lives.

In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride.

Words are powerful; if you change your words, you can change your life.